The most successful businesses are those with confidence in their ability to store, access and use data effectively. Rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of storage, this view point looks at the data it holds and more importantly, what can be done with it.

This review looks at why small businesses need to stop being complacent about their networks and at what they can do to maintain their competitive edge as they follow the big boys down the route of increasing collaboration and other bandwidth-hungry applications likely to impact on network performance and availability.

Gartner believes that the companies could alter established "competitive
dynamics" in industries ranging from utilities to healthcare and retail.

"Increasingly, it is not the economic factors that drive the innovation of
the 'cool' vendor. Instead, we are seeing a marked shift in the fundamental
workings of relationships, people, and their use of technology that are changing
in the 21st century," said Daryl Plummer, a managing vice president and Gartner
fellow.

Businesses that deliver engaging and social software or services will win the
most favour this year, according to Gartner, as more customers make this part of
their own internal agendas.

"The smart investor or technology user will seek out companies that drive the
support of this change," said Michele Cantara, a research vice president at
Gartner.

"No longer can we spend time looking only at the needs of the organisation,
nor can we limit our efforts to product purchases as opposed to services. The
future of the Cool Vendor is the same as the future of business and consumer use
of technology in the world."

Rob Lovell, chief executive at ThinkGrid, which was named on the list,
explained that Gartner had recognised the impact of cloud computing on the
infrastructure space, and the "irreversible" trend towards the industrialisation
of IT infrastructure services.

"There is so much innovation going on in this space to make sure customers
are realising all the cost and management savings, and maintaining and
increasing flexibility and control of IT services," he said.